This piece is by Luke Aitkins, CEO of Bertie
Despite years of investment in insurance technology, many MGAs still rely on information being entered multiple times across systems when collecting and tracking data. Re-keying – whenever the same information is manually entered more than once across systems, documents or workflows – remains one of the most prevalent costs and biggest risks for firms.
At a time when MGA leaders are focused on profitable growth, operational leverage and data-driven decision making, re-keying increasingly raises an important question: why is information still being moved manually between systems at all?
Challenges within productivity
Insurance businesses continue to invest heavily in technology designed to improve underwriting performance, yet a significant proportion of underwriting time remains focused on administration rather than risk assessment. Research cited by PropertyCasualty360 found that underwriters spend only 26% of their time on core underwriting activities, with the remainder consumed by administrative work and navigating fragmented systems. Meanwhile, long-running industry research from Accenture and The Institutes found that underwriters spend around 70% of their time on non-underwriting activities.
Highly skilled professionals within the industry are often spending valuable time transferring information between systems rather than applying expertise, assessing risk or developing their professional networks. As MGAs expand these inefficiencies become easier to recognise, as workload increases, which means the volume of data entered through manual input does too.
The hidden cost of manual input
Manual input requires time, introduces friction, increases risk and creates an additional need for verification. For the teams working with operational systems every day, these small inefficiencies quickly add up, reducing productivity and diverting attention away from higher-value work.
As MGAs grow, the impact extends beyond day-to-day administration. Manual processes often require additional people and resources simply to maintain existing workflows, increasing operational costs without delivering additional value. This not only slows the business’s ability to scale, but can also affect service levels, employee satisfaction and the capacity to respond quickly to new opportunities.
These wider costs are often difficult to quantify because they accumulate gradually. Teams recognise the frustration of inefficient systems long before the financial impact becomes visible, by which point increased workloads, slower turnaround times and operational complexity are already limiting growth.
Businesses that streamline the flow of information reduce these hidden costs, enabling teams to work more efficiently while allowing the organisation to grow without a proportional increase in administrative overhead or operational expense.
Why data quality matters
Any time information is manually transferred, there is potential for inconsistency. Small differences in formatting, human errors or newer figures can gradually create multiple versions of what should be the same record.
Left unchecked, these small discrepancies can grow into larger operational challenges, leading to confusion across the supply chain, wasted employee time, miscommunication and a loss of visibility and control over strategic decision-making. Recent research from IBM found that 43% of chief operations officers identify data quality as their most significant data priority, while more than a quarter of organisations estimate that poor data quality costs them over $5 million annually.
Within insurance, the consequences are particularly significant. Pricing decisions, portfolio management, regulatory reporting and bordereaux production all depend on reliable and consistent information. This is key across all insurance, but particularly important within high-risk sectors.
When data must be continually validated, put together and corrected, decision-making slows and the need for approving the information increases. This means teams can end up spending more time confirming what is correct and less time acting on insight.
As insurers place greater emphasis on analytics, automation and artificial intelligence, the importance of trusted data foundations will only increase.
The next phase of MGA transformation
The persistence of re-keying highlights a broader challenge within insurance technology. MGA operations have often been supported by separate platforms implemented at different stages of growth.
These systems may perform their individual roles effectively, but they can also create fragmented workflows where information must repeatedly be recreated or transferred as it moves through the business.
Today, the opportunity increasingly lies in eliminating unnecessary handoffs altogether. The objective is no longer simply to process information more efficiently, but to create continuity of information so that data only needs to be entered once and can then flow seamlessly through various processes.
This change will influence operating costs, data quality, governance, scalability and ultimately the ability of MGA teams to focus on higher-value work.
How can we minimize the problem?
Rather than treating varied data as separate stages supported by different records, newer operating models aim to maintain a single source of information throughout the insurance lifecycle. This is the principle behind resources like Bertie.
By maintaining a single record, work can move through the business without repeated re-keying between systems. A single flow of information can reduce operational costs, improve data consistency and provide greater confidence in the information used for underwriting, reporting and account management. More importantly, it allows specialist teams to focus their time on areas where expertise creates value rather than on the administration required to move information from one system to another. As MGAs continue to scale, the organisations that can remove operational friction while maintaining confidence in their data are likely to be best positioned for long-term growth.
Looking ahead
Re-keying may sound like an operational inconvenience, but it reflects the broader challenge around how information moves through an organisation and, critically, how much it can be trusted.
The businesses that gain the greatest advantage will be those that reduce administrative friction, strengthen confidence in their data and allow underwriters to focus on assessing risk, applying judgement and supporting growth. For them, the future looks brightest.
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